4 SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 



that the Egyptians and Babylonians were richly 

 endowed peoples who had already some consider- 

 able knowledge of geometry and astronomy. 



Anyhow, whatever the cause, in Greece, twenty- 

 five centuries ago, there arose geniuses with brains 

 as big, and active, and speculative, with an intel- 

 lectual appetency as keen, as the world has ever 

 known. With wide-open eyes they gazed around 

 them, and saw, and wondered. No longer were 

 there mammoths, and woolly rhinoceroses to slay ; 

 and they had not only brains, but leisure to use 

 them. 



All the old civilisations — Babylonia, Egypt, Peru 

 — arose, as was natural, where climatic conditions 

 were favourable ; and these Greek thinkers, born 

 in a beautiful land, with a beautiful climate, had 

 " shelter to grow ripe and leisure to grow wise." 

 The old explanations of things would not fit their 

 larger horizons : the old categories would not 

 contain their larger facts : the old gods failed to 

 satisfy their new appetite for truth. They gazed 

 around : the islands gleamed in the blue ocean, 

 they saw men with brawny limbs, and women with 

 rounded bosoms, and in their souls was born a sense 

 of beauty, so that they carved wonderful statues 

 and made great poems ; and lo ! there appeared a 

 Homer, or a Phidias, or a Euripides, or a Sophocles. 

 They gazed around : and they saw above them the 



